When Your Book Is Last

When you’re in the expertise business, you tend to think of your book as coming first—you use it to tease out your point of view and introduce ideas. But what if—as our last guest Mike Michalowicz suggested—your book should instead be last?

Jonathan and I were intrigued by this idea and wanted to explore it further:

Why book as business card is not the book that will still be relevant and valuable in 20-30 years.

How to introduce your book content to ideal readers so they can help you use the right language, examples and stories.

Using your book idea to build a tribe of support for your eventual launch.

Positioning your book so it has a built-in base of readers—and is attractive to potential publishers.

The benefits from teaching your material before you ever start writing the actual book.

Quotables

“A more reliable path is to write a book that could theoretically be still getting read 20 years from now.”—JS

“If you’re going to pitch your book to a publisher, they want to know: how does this book position against these other (competitive) books?”—RM

“What you want is the feedback from people who are hearing this stuff for the first time.”—JS

“You need a launch team—you need a bunch of people supporting your book to help make it successful.”—RM

“They might tell me my baby’s ugly, but that’s what you want. You don’t wanna write the book and then find out that your baby’s ugly.”—JS

“It (a webinar) gives you a lot of experience with talking about the book and getting comfortable, listening and synthesizing what they’re saying.”—RM

“If people do show up (for your webinar), you’re getting a head start on your marketing language.”—JS

“For the kind of book that we’re talking about, you’ve gotta have some other people invested in its success—where they get excited about it, they want to share it.”—RM